Free-roaming dogs are a persistent issue in many Indian cities. In Delhi, rising dog-bite incidences and reported rabies cases have prompted intense public debate, policy action by municipal agencies, and a high-profile Supreme Court intervention in August 2025. This review examines the geography of the stray dog–human conflict in Delhi, focusing on dog-bite trends, rabies epidemiology, and governance responses, including the 2025 Supreme Court judgment on dog management. Using published epidemiological studies, municipal surveillance data, and Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme documents, the paper analyses temporal and seasonal dog-bite patterns and identifies neighbourhood-level risk concentrations driven by waste availability, urban density, and uneven ABC coverage. Comparative cases from Bengaluru, Kerala, and Mumbai show similar challenges of fragmented implementation, rapid dog population turnover, and persistent hotspots, while Kerala’s expanded anti-rabies initiatives demonstrate measurable reductions in human rabies but heightened community tensions. Findings highlight the need for spatially targeted interventions, improved waste management, and strengthened ward-level sterilisation and vaccination cycles. The study concludes that Delhi’s conflict is shaped by ecological and institutional factors, and that durable solutions require aligning public-health priorities with legal and animal-welfare frameworks.

This study assesses India’s climate finance requirement from 2022-2030 to decarbonise its four major carbon-emitting sectors—cement, steel, power, and road transport. Climate finance or additional capital expenditure (capex) for transitioning to a low-carbon economy, i.e., over and above the capex already planned in the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, has been estimated at US$467 billion for 2022-2030 or 1.3 per cent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) annually. This comprises US$251 billion for the steel sector, followed by US$141 billion for cement, US$57 billion for power and US$18 billion for road transport. The estimated investment in the four sectors will reduce the use of 291 million tonnes of coal and 72 billion litres of petrol and diesel, mitigating 6.9 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions (excluding road transport). The study also evaluated the macroeconomic consistency of India’s estimated climate finance requirement. Overall, capital and financial flows net of the projected current account deficit (CAD) for India are estimated at US$530 billion during 2023–2030 as against the projected expansion of US$474 billion in monetary base. Thus, India would need to skilfully manage both (i) capital flows in the BAU; and (ii) climate finance from external sources. India may have to strategically widen its CAD, subject to a maximum of 2.5 per cent of GDP.

It has been eight years since India adopted the inflation targeting (IT) framework for its monetary policy. In this paper we present a comprehensive analysis of the IT regime, addressing several critical aspects. We evaluate the performance of inflation over this period, and review the conduct of monetary policy during and after the Covid- 19 pandemic. We also identify key challenges that persist particularly in context of the Impossible Trilemma and highlight issues that may require further examination in order to improve the effectiveness of the IT framework in the future.

Medical devices are one of the most crucial segment of a country’s healthcare system. This paper reviews the demand and supply side factors, including socio-economic, market-enabling, technological and policy instruments, that could drive the growth of the medical device industry. It highlights some key issues and challenges the sector is grappling with. Despite there being several enabling factors for the sector’s growth, India primarily manufactures medical equipment within the low-tech segment, from consumable to implantable devices. This leaves domestic requirements unmet in other segments, pushing the country to import expensive equipment in the advanced technology segment. This drives up the cost of medical equipment, leading to higher diagnostic test fees for end-users, which in turn places a significant out-of-pocket financial payment burden on households for diagnostic services.

This paper looks at reported subsidy spending in India, in light of ongoing central initiatives to build transparency and accessibility of information related to financial operations and decisions of public expenditure. Subsidies have become a prominent policy tool for public resource allocation in India. However, without a clear definition and reporting of ‘subsidy’, the term tends to be loosely used to encompass many schemes and programs of the Union and state governments, including the recent rise in ‘freebies’, which need to be clearly differentiated. Moreover, many forms of financing through special securities and extra-budgetary resources have been used to finance subsidy spending, making it difficult to comprehensively define and measure subsidy expenditure in the budget and other annual accounts. These issues relate to the existence of data gaps in India’s fiscal reporting and accounts, which are a critical area of concern due to the large financial implications of subsidy expenditures. This paper identifies how subsidy spending has been accounted in India and explains the resultant data gaps that render such fiscal data inconsistent and incomparable across levels of government. The paper seeks to understand whether the present reporting of subsidy spending in the finance accounts and budget documents provide clear and comprehensive information about budget allocations, revenue sources, expenditures, and other related financial matters. It then proposes steps in the way forward to improve their transparency.

The paper discusses the precarity of employment for vulnerable workers, and the laws and policies meant for protecting the interests of migrants. To provide a more complete picture of the migrants belonging to the marginalized and vulnerable sections, field work was carried out in two slums of Delhi to gauge their socioeconomic conditions, nature of employment, and living conditions. The employment structure in Delhi has also been examined, using secondary data, to gauge the pattern of informal employment. The figures reveal a very sordid picture, as a majority of the workers in Delhi do not have any social security or legal protection of their jobs, and work under terrible conditions. While the social security system has been expanded to cover informal workers, migrant workers are still excluded, as the institutional structure of these schemes is creating problems in being accessible to migrants. All these factors point towards the complete lack of visibility of migrants for decades from the policy framework. There is an urgent need to develop strategies that reduce the vulnerabilities of migrants in the cities and help alleviate their miseries.

India is developing a unique approach to the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) and is staking out a leadership role in multilateral dialogues on responsible AI. This paper reviews India’s available AI governance choices, as the country defines its regulatory model, and highlights their associated trade-offs. It also analyses these choices in light of the government’s national priorities, as well as India’s perceived advantages and weaknesses in various industries that might utilize AI systems. With this background, this paper examines how India’s current approach to AI governance may impact the trajectory of U.S.-India technology cooperation.

This paper examines how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) uses information as an instrument of strategic warfare, across military and non-military domains, in the pursuit of strategic advantage over India. Beijing’s ‘information operations’ encompass the creation, manipulation, or selective use of information to discredit New Delhi’s international profile, advance territorial claims, and show the PRC in a favourable light to domestic and international audiences. The PRC’s diplomatic missions, State/Party-owned & affiliated media organizations, and social media users play an important role in amplifying this pro-PRC narrative. This paper therefore elaborates on the tactics adopted by the above actors in deploying an information operation, ranging from the use of falsely attributed material, the targeting of India’s leaders, and the creation of deepfakes. While it is difficult to quantify the success of these information operations, they are of consequence to India’s domestic stability and global strategic outlook, and further engender a hostile international environment. Given the PRC’s capacity to disrupt India's information ecosystem and infrastructure, this paper recommends that India’s deterrence strategy should focus on technological resilience, raising public awareness, and enhancing international cooperation.

This paper examined the trends in private and public expenditure on education in India during the last seven decades. The analysis is based on public expenditure on education compiled by Ministry of Education, Government of India, that includes expenditure incurred by education department as well as by all other departments on education and training-related programmes and activities. The private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) on education as estimated by the national accounts and statistics (NAS) is the base for private expenditure on education. It is observed from the analysis that India’s spending on education reached its peak in the recent past. Public and private expenditure on education are respectively equivalent to 3.9% and 2.7% of its GDP in 2018-19. Together, the country’s spending on education is equivalent to 6.6% of GDP. A notable trend over the past three decades is that private expenditure on education is growing faster than that of the public. The ratio of public to private in terms of expenditure on education has declined during this period. This reflects increasing privatisation of education in India, and has far reaching policy implications.


 The true trend in tax revenues has been obscured by pandemic-related effects, inflation, and discretionary policy changes in recent years. These hinder accurate assessment of the state of the economy, a correct picture of which can only be had by stripping out these effects. In particular, the increasing deployment of additional revenue measures in succession for several years has masked information on the economy’s health that is observed from the automatic movement of tax revenues along with the GDP. This paper focuses upon tax buoyancy, which includes discretionary policy changes, to examine how the historical relationship of tax revenues with income may have been disturbed by exceptional shocks. Using early data and other evidence, it illustrates probable impacts of non-linear and asymmetric normalisation, the extraordinary price growth and uneven distribution thereof, and fiscal policy responses in the pandemic. It further compiles additional revenue mobilization measures for a longer period from 2011-12 to highlight how newer and fresher fiscal efforts have been used to complement a stagnant or shrinking tax base and how these can be distortionary in aspects beyond the diffusion of important macroeconomic signals.